Liars

The Hippodrome looks for all the world like the last place you’d expect to find a rock band. Luckily, I’m not watching one.

I’m watching an overweight lady dance. She’s stroking the scalp of her gentleman companion, her thick fingers working their way over and through what little hair he has left. She’s out of time entirely with what’s in the air this evening, completely oblivious to the rhythms that wind about each other, to the percussion that blisters ear lobes and bounces grey matter into a state of ecstasy. She isn’t alone: there is no set-in-stone physical appreciation programme where* Liars *are concerned. All one can do is relax their muscles and be moved, carried away to some bright portal of otherworldly significance; on the other side unknowns are readily accepted and anything approaching conformity and cliché jettisoned into the darkest depths of unexplored space.

Thus, heads bob and bodies weave, the floor before the three a rippling sea of souls ready and willing to be taken away from overpriced bottled lager and marble-effect bathrooms, sparkling drapes and bottomless mirrors. Eyes are wide and sheet lightning white, pupils smaller than the tiniest pinhead; those of the trio burn redder than the fieriest corners of a Looney Tunes hell, their limbs acting unaided by bioelectric brainwaves, their songs detached from conventional drums-and-guitars-and-stuff compositional rigidity and allowed to stretch and reach for an entrancing whole that such few components have no right to ably construct. This is routine and ritual; this is surreal and wonderful; this is a vortex of sound that whirls like the most violent wind and strips the body clean of imperfection, worry and weight.

Temporarily, everyone – even the balcony attendee so enamoured with her paramour’s skull – is transported to a place where walls are made of marshmallow and the floor beneath us a slow-moving quicksand; once we’re swallowed, the blackness will break to harsh reality once again. Someone taps my shoulder: a nod, a gesture implying friendliness, small talk and awkward go your own way-ing. This isn’t a family affair, a group experience: although there are many assembled above and below these eyes and ears, Liars’ convulsive and combustive poly-rhythmical works affect the sole, not the some. Each to their own, experience-wise. Shut my eyes and I burst into inflammations of shivering turbulence and tumultuous pleasure.

Chanting, tribal and me-against-you: Liars versus the volcano, fossilised flowers around necks and an angry all-seeing Sort whose appetite knows no sating. Singing and sighing and stuttering raps and spits about escapades through the distressed avant-garde: in the lurches between lulls are coded messages of how to get out, how to escape the crunch come the crux of this performance, this dramatic retelling of a future unlived as yet. Perhaps the mirrors – all around, each an immovable door to some backwards dimension – contain further clues: scattered shards of light refract and play their way elsewhere, straight as arrows and focused of purpose, as beneath the enraptured snap out of their hypnotism and meander their way, groggily semi-circling all and sundry that stand similarly bedazzled before them, for pocket-emptying refreshments. Headspaces are brimming with colour and the drip paths that intersect each other across a slowly vacated floor spell ‘stars’. But did they come from or are they headed to?

Find the boring and hackneyed at those outer reaches, trace rocket vapour trails back to where a triumvirate of burning star cores are orbited by more life than even Earth can offer, and here Liars wait; the sons of suns, aliens abroad, holidaying here. The Hippodrome’s no place for a rock band; an interstellar genre-compounding group of psychedelia-soaked starship captains, though… wherever they leave their shooting-through-space (and time) satellites of sound, that’s their stop-a-while home.

Photograph by Steve Gullick